Disconnected Web Browsing

Status: Past project

Project Description:

This project addresses issues related to personalization and
asynchronous operation to support wireless access to the web. Currently,
the protocols associated with information browsing have been designed to
work in wired environments that are capable of transmitting and receiving
large amounts of data without significant delays. However, due to the
various resource constraints of the mobile hosts, these protocols do not
operate well in a wireless environment. Also, the current model of web
browsing leaves the burden of finding relevant information on the user.
The user has to search through the documents following links, and find
the information he/she needs thereby wasting bandwidth and other resources
on tranmitting data that is useless to the user over the wireless links.
Moreover, the synchronous nature of the HTTP protocol requires a continuous
connection for the duration of the information retrieval process.

We are addressing these issues by developing a proxy based system that
replaces the exisiting http client server system with a client-intelligent
proxy- intelligent server system, with the clients, proxies and servers
constituting a cooperative multiagent system that provide active transcoding,
information retrieval, personalization and disconnected management.
W3IQ proxy splits information access into a set of asynchronous
transaction like operations and also maintains state information while
disconnections occur. W3IQ proxy allows the user to specify requests as queries,
rather than explicit URLs and takes up the burden of locating the right information
on behalf of the user. Thus the W3IQ agent acts as an information broker and a
recommender.

The system will also support other interaction formats. For example,
the users could ask for monitoring changes in certain web pages, ask to be
informed whenever new movies are played at his theatre of choice and also be
sent a review of the movie and its rating.

We are also working on Automatic Profile Development by monitoring the
ratings of users and dynamically forming groups of users with similar
interests within a proxy and also across all the peer proxies. These groups
get updated (new groups are created, existing groups are merged, users
moved between the groups) as and when more content is rated.